Jewel Of The Nile

Chapter Eighteen

The first time Sybil Trelawney realised she had the Gift, she was seven years old.

Seven years old, and -- like half the other girls in her class at school -- crazy for horses. There was no money for riding lessons, of course -- with six children in the family, on a machinist's salary, individual luxuries like that were an impossibility, and even at seven Sybil knew it was useless to ask. But she did at least want to see some, up close -- National Velvet was not only her favourite book, but also her favourite movie (never mind that it was more than twenty years old even before she was born), and she pranced and whinnied and galloped the broom round the house with her head crouched low over the end like pretty Elizabeth Taylor until finally her mum threw up her hands one Saturday morning and said -- for the love of God, Jack, she'll drive me mad in another minute, if she's so wild to see horses, take her to the track and show her some, why don't you?

That was a wonderful day.

First of all, it meant being with Daddy, just the two of them, which almost never happened; Jack Trelawney worked long hours at a grueling job and came home almost too tired to eat, let alone get one-on-one quality time with his children. Sybil, as the next-to-youngest, couldn't remember the last time she'd been out with him alone, especially for a Just-For-Fun outing that was going to take all of Saturday morning.

And then there were the horses – big, proud, skittish Thoroughbreds with long legs and tossing heads – too bad-tempered and grand, her father said, for her to pat. Which was a great disappointment to her. But then one of the grooms, a wizened little ex-jockey with one dragging leg, saw her trembling lip, her filling eyes, and took time out from his stall-mucking to limp over to a big corner box and bring out one of the lead ponies, a small dun Shetland only a bit taller than himself.

"Here, now, lassie," he said, "Chester here is more your size, and not so snappish as the big ‘uns." He winked at her. "Come give him a pat, there’s a good girl."

Instinctively, she looked to her father for permission; he was smiling. Gingerly she moved closer, laid her hand on the pony’s shiny flank, which twitched lazily under her small fingers.

Oh.

And oh again for the velvety nose, the deep intelligence in the warm brown eyes, the curious way the hair grew out in all different directions from that white star on his forehead.

Oh, I love you, she thought. And then the groom had picked her right up, after a nod from her father, and set her down on the pony’s back – and for a few brief, golden moments, Sybil imagined that she knew just how National Velvet must have felt.

The rest of the day couldn’t compete with the pony ride, but Sybil didn’t mind. Daddy had some papers and a little stub of a pencil – "here, Sybbie, come look at this," he said; "here are all their names – why don’t you pick one out for me?"

She’d looked down the list, scanning names as exotic and beautiful as the horses themselves: Cherry Bomb, Sunset Boulevard, Night Train, Cannonball. "Why?" she’d asked, and a few of the men sitting near to them in the stands had rolled their eyes and laughed.

Daddy hadn’t laughed, though. "They’re going to race," he explained. "It’s a guessing game – we try to guess which one will win the race, but before they run. And the people who guess right win prizes."

Sybil’s eyes lit up. "Trophies?"

"Money," her father corrected. Sybil considered this.

"A lot of money?"

"Sometimes."

"Oh." She looked out toward the track. "Which ones are the ones on the list?"

"The ones waiting to run – there, that group over on the right." Sybil shaded her eyes, followed his pointing finger.

And suddenly knowledge settled into her brain, as sure and certain as Daddy’s hand in hers. "There," she’d said. "That black one, with the orange blanket. That one’s the winner."

The men who had been eavesdropping laughed again.

"She sounds pretty sure," one of them said, not unkindly. "Long shot, though. That horse’s name is Odd Man Out, and he sure lives up to it. Hasn’t won a match yet."

Daddy looked at her. "You sure, Sybbie?" She only nodded – of course I’m sure; I just saw him win! – and he shrugged. "It’s only a tenner," he said to the others, and ruffled her hair affectionately. "Won’t be the first one I’ve lost, either."

But Odd Man Out won his race – and paid 75 to 1.

**

Sybil had never seen Daddy so happy. "Steak tonight," he’d said, grinning – and he didn’t mean from the market, either. They all went out to the pub to dinner, all eight of them, which meant no dishes to do afterwards. Margaret got the braces she’d been needing – and Sybil herself got her own first-Communion dress after all, instead of having Sheila’s cut down for her.

And the next time Daddy went to the track, he took Sybil along with him again.

She was never wrong – not that day, and not in the Saturdays to come. And her father had been playing the ponies long enough to choose his bets wisely … he might only lay money on one, but it would inevitably be the long shot, the big payoff.

"My little lucky charm," he called her, "Lucky" for short, and the men at the track must have agreed, because they didn’t laugh at her anymore, just watched her silently from the corners of their eyes as she passed, trotting at his heels. Sybil didn’t know how much money Daddy was betting, only that he was always happy on the way home.

Which made her happy, too.

And then one night the bad men came to their house, with their soft scary voices and their leather sticks, and after they were gone Mum was crying and Daddy white and silent and holding his stomach like it hurt him, and after that they didn’t go to the track on Saturdays anymore.

Guessing the horses, Sybil decided, was a more dangerous game than anyone had told her. And didn’t look into her head for the future for the next four years.

**

But then there was Hogwarts – on one hand, her parents hadn’t exactly approved of her course of study, but on the other hand, it was boarding school, an unheard-of-luxury by their neighbourhood’s standards, and it was free. And after all, as Mum said wearily under her breath when she thought Sybil wasn’t listening, it wasn’t as if they didn’t have bigger Troubles … what with Patrick and Declan off God-knows-where with the militia, and Michael not yet nine, and yearning to be away after them.

"At least she’ll be safe," Sybil heard her say to Dad, in a low voice that seemed to grow more bitter, more accusing every day; "away in the middle of nowhere, the place not even on a map – not like Margaret and Sheila, and me praying all day they’ll come home safe from school. And our boys in the middle of it, and you – you talking politics around Mike, and him barely off the tit. When’s this going to end?"

Questions, questions, for which there were no answers, just a clenched jaw and prayers to a God who didn’t seem to be listening. And so she went to Hogwarts, and studied, and graduated.

And as it turned out, being a witch was no proof against violence.

The year she graduated, the Great War with Voldemort was raging on with no hint of slowing – perhaps it was even at its height. There was no ceremony, no pomp to mark the end of school – just the end-of-year exams, then a hug and a keep-in-touch from bleak-eyed professors who’d already buried too many of their best and brightest. Sybil, who upon her arrival had been sorted into Slytherin, and who had gone to great lengths to make herself seem unremarkable ever since, had not been actively recruited either by Light or by Dark, and was frankly glad of it … this was yet another battle she wanted no part of. Who was Voldemort, after all, but another petty bigot? Who were the Forces of Light, but another ragtag resistance group?

And Sybil knew all about those – didn’t she have two brothers in the IRA, and one of them starving himself in Maze Prison while the news cameras raped his emaciated body in the name of Publicity for the Cause?

Hadn’t she once had three?

Surely one headstone was enough price to pay to the Gods of War. And besides, there were other worries. Margaret, who had two small children and one on the way, and her husband away running guns. Sheila, who’d gotten enough compliments on her pretty voice and her pretty legs that she wanted to try for Broadway, in New York … but would be waiting tables for ten years before she could get there.

Mum, who had just last month found a mysterious lump in her right breast. And Dad, laid off at the plant and so sick with it all that he seemed determined to drink himself into the grave.

So, Sybil had put off the thought of university, Reduced everything she owned into a walnut-sized package in her pocket, and caught the Knight Bus to Monte Carlo.

This whole island was soaked in blood. She needed a change of pace.

She rented a storage locker at the bus station with the last of her money, dropped off her tiny parcel, and walked into the biggest casino in Monte Carlo with her wand tucked into her brassiere at ten o’ clock on a Wednesday night, the week after she graduated, wearing a thirty-dollar knockoff of a designer dress and carrying nothing but a slot-machine token that she’d Transfigured out of a bottle cap.

By ten-thirty, she’d made three thousand dollars US.

By midnight, the figure had jumped to thirty.

At two a.m. she had a cashier’s check in her hand for two hundred thousand dollars, made out to her mother, and another three grand in a tight wad of hundreds inside the Lycra band of her pantyhose.

By Thursday noon, the check was mailed, and she was on her way to Atlantic City.

Things were looking up.

**

She didn’t intend to make the same mistake with her Gift that her father had made – and she’d done well enough at Transfiguration that she didn’t have to. A new name for every plane trip, a new passport for every emigration, a series of new faces – old, young, plain, beautiful, in such a variety of shapes and colours and degrees of attraction that she even dazzled herself. Clever, Sybil, clever. She could have worked the same casino every night of the week for a solid year, and never been tagged as the same girl.

But she kept moving on – city after city, country after country, while the bankbooks kept piling up in one name after another. Where do we send the statements? the mystified bankers would inevitably ask, and Sybil would shrug – it didn’t matter, after all, whether the account made money or not; chances were she’d never touch it again.

But it was there.

At first she’d been ecstatic to be alone. And then, when – inevitably – the loneliness set in, there was always someone there who was willing to stifle it for awhile.

After all, why not?

And then, she caught herself shunning the easy conquests, preferring again to sit alone … but instead of watching the world go by as she’d done at first, she’d stare at whatever visage she’d assigned to herself for that night – in mirrors, in plate glass, in the polished brass fittings of whatever posh bar she was sitting at – and wonder: am I in there?

No pictures from her student days. No pictures from home.

Nothing to reflect her own face back at her.

Sybil, you’re losing it. But she didn’t care, she didn’t – not about the luxury, the hotels, the in-room masseurs, the car service … and not about the money, either the boatloads she sent back to that same humble little address in Belfast (were they still there? Did it matter if they were?), or the boatloads she kept for herself. Even the thrill of the Gift was gone … and in the long empty hours between midnight and dawn, her brain kept reeling her back to the same bloody pictures she’d tried so hard over the years to suppress: sprawled bodies, cold laughter, screaming children, graves.

And then had come that night in Moscow, the night of her twenty-fifth birthday (but who’s counting, tell me that?) in a black-market casino high above the city. Blonde, tonight … a platinum bombshell’s bob, swinging free and easy past a delicately pointed jaw, over high Slavic cheekbones. Her dress was tight and high and the same sunset orange as her lipstick; instead of jewelry, she’d given herself the magical equivalent of tattoos, heavy links of gunmetal chain around her wrists, her ankles, her throat.

Her heels were high and her eyes were sharp and the men were looking and licking their lips but not coming too close – I’m owned, those tattoos said, and by someone who can kick your ass hog-tied and blindfolded.

It wasn’t true, of course. But the deception amused her.

These days, deception was about the only thing that did. Guess you’re a Slytherin after all, aren’t you, Sybil?

She’d been playing poker, and she had about a hundred thousand in winnings, U.S. – the Russkies liked to play for Yank money. They’d all seen it disappear into her chic little silver-mesh Prada bag: in about fifteen minutes, one of them was going to get greedy and come sniffing.

Sybil rather hoped he would.

And then someone said her name – her real name, not the false one she’d given out – Malya, or Katya, or whatever it was.

"Sybil."

She turned, surprised, and nearly spilled her Scotch.

Albus Dumbledore was standing a foot away from her. And he looked old.

**

"Sybil, we need you," he’d said that night, back at her hotel room. "We need a Seer. Voldemort’s crawled off to God knows where, but he’s not dead yet – I doubt he can die. The trials are over; we’re rebuilding. But I don’t want to go into whatever’s next blindfolded."

"What makes you think I can help you?" She’d tried for insouciance. "My grades in Divination were middle-of-the-road, Albus. And I’ll tell you now that I made all the astrological stuff up."

"Don’t." He passed his hand wearily over his eyes. "I know, Sybil. And it’s time you did your part for the Cause that protected you."

"The Cause." She stood up abruptly, hurled her little bag full of money so hard at the opposite wall that it split in half, showering greenbacks in all directions. She ignored it. "Do you think I give a damn about your Cause, Albus? That I give a damn about your martyrs? I’ve got ghosts of my own to worry about – I can’t take on yours too."

"They’re not just mine." He looked around him at the opulent suite, the glass-and-steel furniture, the blood-red carpet. "And you’re made for more than this – you weren’t given the Gift to spend your life running away from it."

"I’m not running away. I’m using it."

"Bollocks." He looked suddenly angry, suddenly bigger. "You’re wasting it. Wasting yourself."

She turned away. "What’s your point?"

"I’m offering you a job," he said, and she froze, startled.

"A job?"

He nodded. "What follows the fall of a dictatorship, Sybil?"

She thought for a moment. "Anarchy?"

"Mm." He sighed. "The political climate is … restless. The Ministry’s fragmented. Voldemort’s followers are clever – those who survived – they’ve either gone to ground completely, or managed to clear their names." He frowned. "For now."

Okay, she’d bite. "What does that have to do with me?"

"I need a Divination teacher. And an actress."

"What about Fortescue?"

"Retiring," Albus said. "And his sons don’t share his gift, regrettably –" here he looked slightly more cheerful – "though one of them is quite a skilled confectioner … " Seeming to remember himself, he shot her a self-deprecating smile and cocked his head to the side. "Sorry. I’m a man of simple pleasures."

Don’t lose the point, Albus, Sybil thought. "An actress?" she queried. He nodded.

"A charlatan," he said. "I have plenty of smart people on the staff who advertise their smarts. What I could use, right now, is a brilliant mind … who can disguise herself as a fool."

Sybil caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror – all angles and haute couture and sulky, plasticine beauty. Not her own face. Not her own body. Not her own style.

But then, after all these years, what was?

"We can’t save those who are already gone," Albus said gently. "But there are plenty of others who we can. Will you help me?"

Half-unwillingly, she bowed that bright-blonde head in assent. And thought that maybe, just maybe, she’d seen a flash of something familiar in the mirror … for the first time in years.

**

That was the beginning.

And now, now that she’d mastered her act so thoroughly that she half-believed it herself sometimes, Albus was giving her a new assignment.

Hermione Granger’s babysitter.

Hmph.

Well, she could deal with one snotty brat, couldn’t she? And from what she remembered of Cairo, it was a spectacular city.

She rather hoped Lucius Malfoy didn’t show his pointy face … for a long, long time.